• Giant weed complicates border security

    To add to the difficulties of patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border, an invasive species of giant weeds has infested rivers throughout the southwest, particularly the Rio Grande in Texas, providing dense cover for illegal activities

  • Inmate-trained wild horses help secure U.S. border

    Border patrol agents have a new ally in the fight to secure the U.S-Mexico border – specially trained horses – and it is all thanks to prison inmates

  • Volunteers and cash pour in for private border fence

    Donations and volunteers continue to pour in for a privately funded fence along the U.S.– Mexico border in Arizona, according to Republican state legislator Steve Smith

  • Senate Homeland Security Committee probes Fast and Furious

    Last Wednesday, Senator Joe Lieberman (I – Connecticut), the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, directed his committee to examine the miscommunication between law enforcement agencies and the Justice Department in regards to the beleaguered gun tracking program dubbed “Fast and Furious”

  • DHS to drawdown troops along U.S.-Mexico border

    Beginning in January the National Guard troops deployed along the U.S-Mexico border will begin heading home to their respective states as part of a broader shift in their mission; the 1,200 troops currently deployed will be reduced to 300, with the majority of them focusing on supporting border patrol efforts in the air rather than on the ground

  • CBP receives its ninth UAV

    CBP announced it has received its fourth Predator-B UAV to be used for patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border; CBP can now deploy its unmanned aircraft from the eastern tip of California across the common Mexican land borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas

  • Cartels eye Puerto Rico as new cash smuggling route

    Over the past year law enforcement officials in Puerto Rico have seized an increasing amount of smuggled cash, indicating that cartels may be shifting their attention to the island as an alternative route to transport drug money

  • CBP is using automated rail and sea e-manifests

    CBP said it began using Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) e-Manifest for rail and sea; the ACE pilots, which began in November, focus on transitioning full rail and sea manifest capability to ACE from the legacy system

  • DHS helps New Mexico battle local gangs and cartels

    In recent years, DHS has sent more and more federal agents and resources to New Mexico to help local law enforcement officials battle gangs, catch drug dealers, and other criminals; since 2009 DHS has deployed more than sixty agents to New Mexico and formed several joint task forces and multiagency groups

  • The border fear index: How to measure border security

    Both the administration and its critics rely on the FBI Uniform Crime Reports and on reported by the national media to make their arguments about how secure the U.S.-Mexican border is, and how to make it more secure; Lee Maril contends that the FBI report and the national media do not offer an accurate picture of the situation along the border because they are not nuanced enough; for example, they ignore the fear instilled in border-area residents by the cartels and the cartels’ collaborators, and they do not collect other relevant human behavior data

  • CBP on the lookout for terrorists of a different kind – beetles

    This fall customs agents at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport are on the lookout for dangerous visitors of a different kind – diseases; during the fall hunting season, agents are particularly busy inspecting shipments for animal parts or wild game originating from countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia; animal hides, skulls, antlers, heads, or carcasses from exotic game like warthogs, ibex, and birds often carry pernicious exotic diseases like African swine fever, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or Newcastle disease

  • CBP wasted $69 million in building border fence

    A recent government report reveals that DHS wasted $69 million by buying too much steel for a border fence project

  • Another foreign executive arrested in Alabama on immigration charges

    For the second time in recent weeks, Alabama law enforcement officials arrested a foreign car manufacturing executive under the state’s strict new immigration law

  • Supreme Court to hear Arizona immigration law

    On Monday the Supreme Court announced that it would weigh in on the controversial debate surrounding Arizona’s hotly contested immigration law

  • Report challenges criticism of Secure Communities

    A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), an non-profit Washington, D.C.-based organization supporting low immigration, examines the outcomes of ICE’s Secure Communities program and how those outcomes, in CIS words, “have been misleadingly described in one widely circulated study published by the Warren Institute at the University of California, Berkeley Law School”